Low power data converters for specific applications

Due to increasing importance of portable equipment and reduction of the supply voltage due to technology scaling, recent efforts in the design of mixed-signal circuits have focused on developing new techniques to reduce the power dissipation and supply voltage. This requires research into new architectures and circuit techniques that enable both integration and programmability. Programmability allows each component to be used for different applications, reducing the total number of components, and increased integration by eliminating external components will reduce cost and power;Since data converters are used in many different applications, in this thesis new low voltage and low power data converter techniques at both the architecture and circuit design levels are investigated to minimize power dissipation and supply voltage. To demonstrate the proposed techniques, test the performance of the proposed architectures, and verify their effectiveness in terms of power savings, five prototype chips are fabricated and tested;First, a re-configurable data converter (RDC) architecture is presented that can be programmed as analog-to-digital converter (ADC), digital-to-analog converter (DAC), or both. The reconfigurability of the RDC to different numbers of ADCs and DACs having different speeds and resolutions makes it an ideal choice for analog test bus, mixed-mode boundary scan, and built-in self test applications. It combines the advantages of both analog test buses and boundary scan techniques while the area overhead of the proposed techniques is very low compared to the mixed-mode boundary scan techniques. RDC can save power by allowing the designer to program it as the right converter for desired application. This architecture can be potentially implemented inside a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to allow the FPGA communicate with the analog world. It can also be used as a stand-alone product to give flexibility to the user to choose ADC/DAC combinations for the desired application;Next, a new method for designing low power and small area ROMless direct digital frequency synthesizers (DDFSs) is presented. In this method, a non-linear digital-to-analog converter is used to replace the phase-to-sine amplitude ROM look-up table and the linear DAC in conventional DDFS. Since the non-linear DAC converts the phase information directly into analog sine wave, no phase-to-amplitude ROM look-up table is required;Finally, a new low voltage technique based on biased inverting opamp that can have almost rail-to-rail swing with continuously valid output is discussed. Based on this biasing technique, a 10-bit segmented R-2R DAC and an 8-bit successive approximation ADC are designed and presented